Contact Me

Archives

It was incredibly disheartening to find out yesterday morning that Chris Squire had passed away Saturday night from leukemia. He was only 67 and he leaves behind a very young daughter. I can’t imagine how awful it must be to lose a parent when you are six or seven years old. Someone pointed out at a forum just how cruel Fate is: John Entwhistle died on the same date back in 2002. 27 June is just not a good day for bass players.

I never met the man but came close back in 2002 after the Yes show in Milwaukee. Squire seemed the most convivial and eager to sign autographs. He was always the rock star of the band – the least New Age-y and most ready to have a cocktail. My friends and I had really nice seats for that show and I will never forget Squire prancing around with his Rickenbacker. The neck seemed to go on forever and it was really neat to see just how he played “Roundabout” right before my very eyes. Plus he was the one who really hammed it up onstage, especially during “The Fish”.

As a listener, it was Squire who demonstrated to me that the bass could be a melodic instrument. That chewy, spongy tone was up high in the mix and usually heard playing its own melody in contrast to the one everyone else was churning out. The bass was a lead instrument in his hands. And then there was his backing vocals. Squire’s voice was a defining element of Yes’ sound. After Drama his bass may have been further down in the mix and Jon Anderson may have come and gone, but Squire’s tenor shone through. It was the beam from a musical lighthouse letting the listener know that it was Yes they were hearing wherever the bass may be and whoever is singing lead.

No doubt Squire influenced scores of musicians. Geddy Lee, Steve Harris, and Les Claypool seem the obvious ones. Tributes have been posted online from other proggers such as Steve Hackett, Pete Trawavas and John Petrucci but also from folks like Geezer Butler, Brian May, Tom Morello, and Robert Trujillo. Umphrey’s McGee covered “Roundabout” last night in Squire’s honor. Dereck Higgins has a really nice tribute up on YouTube.

And so to commemorate the great musical legacy of Chris Squire, I am posting Yes’ show from their stop here in Madison last year. It was at the Overture Center and the date was 25 July. I was at this show and have my criticisms of it but I’ll leave those for another day.

Sestlist:

Siberian Khatru
And You and I
Close to the Edge
Believe Again
The Game
Roundabout
Cans and Brahms
We Have Heaven
South Side of the Sky
Five Per Cent for Nothing
Long Distance Runaround
The Fish (Schindleria Praematurus)
Mood for a Day
Heart of the Sunrise
Encore:
I’ve Seen All Good People
Owner of a Lonely Heart

I could find no video from this particular show online but I did find “The Fish” from Yes’ show in Houston a couple of weeks later. Squire always seemed to be the one to show off and it was fun to have him up on the stage playing with his bass god reputation.

I was shocked to read a few months ago that Steven Wilson had made Madison a stop on his 2015 tour. He’ll be here this coming Saturday, 6 June, at the Barrymore Theatre. And it was genuinely strange to see him profiled in our local alt-weekly, Isthmus. I believe that this is his first solo gig in Wisconsin, although Porcupine Tree played Milwaukee several times.

Wilson’s latest album, Hand. Cannot. Erase., was released here in the States late last winter. I’ve been listening to it lately in anticipation of this weekend’s show. Sadly, I have to admit that I am nowhere near as familiar with Wilson’s solo work as I am with Porcupine Tree. (Although I did listen to Grace for Drowning and the Lizard-era King Crimson influence was everywhere – it was glorious!) last weekendHand. Cannot. Erase. is thematically reminiscent of latter day PT, say, 2002-2010. It has the requisite dark concept having been loosely based on the sad life of Joyce Carol Vincent, a British woman whose body was discovered in her apartment in January 2006 although she had died in December 2003. Musically it reminds me of Stupid Dream and Lightbulb Sun but this might simply be because the death metal influences that were so prominent in 21st century PT are largely absent here. I mean, check out the Chet Atkins/Steve Howe solo on “3 Years Older”.

And so to celebrate another prog heavyweight coming to town (King Crimson swung through last year), here’s a show from Wilson’s current tour. It’s from 17 March of this year when he and his band played The Troxy in London. We have a really nice audience recording here.

He was one of the last remaining musicians who oversaw the electrification of the blues in the post-war era. Who’s left? Buddy Guy comes to mind. But most of the big names – the people that the likes of Robert Cray and Eric Clapton espouse as being influences – have passed on. We are truly at the end of an era.

I posted King’s set from the 2003 Madison Blues Fest several years ago and it can be found here. Also from a local angle, The Capital Times’ Rob Thomas reminisces about meeting the man himself and has reposted his interview with King from 2006.

Today we have B.B. King’s set from the Madison Blues Fest in 2000. It’s a decent audience recording. Certainly not the best, but quite listenable. Any help with the setlist would be appreciated.

Setlist:
Intro
?
Intro to BB King
?
Survive
Bad Case of Love
Peace of Mind in My Lifetime
?
?
Outskirts of Town
The Thrill Is Gone
?
Got to Love Somebody

Last month my brother passed away and I am posting some shows that he attended as well as shows by bands that he liked but for which he did not leave behind a ticket stub. The first post in this series is here.

This time around it’s Rush.

I recall being a kid and listening to my brother’s pirated copy of Fly By Night. In fact, I ran across it when I was disposing of his belongings. My memories of becoming a Rush fan are rather sporadic, however. After seeing adds for Hold Your Fire in Kerrang! I was looking forward to the release of that album so I was a fan by the summer of 1987. But I’m unsure if that fandom went beyond the FM radio staples of “Tom Sawyer”, “Spirit of Radio”, and the like.

As you can see, my brother saw the band in Chicago on 20 July 2002. I chuckled to myself when I found this stub because I had seen them the day before in Milwaukee. It was a reminder of how much we had in common, I suppose.

After losing his daughter in a car accident in 1997 and then his wife less than a year later, Neil Peart “retired” from music. Thinking back to that time I can remember reading about Peart’s losses and felt terribly for him. I wondered if this was truly the end of Rush. A few years later in 2002 they released Vapor Trails and hit the road. Personally, I found Vapor Trails to be an improvement over Test for Echo. It was loud and energetic and I was eagerly anticipating seeing them live again after an 8-year hiatus. They did not disappoint.

The new material worked well and 90s tunes like “Dreamline” and “Between Sun & Moon” had a bit more punch. The whole concert was full of energy and the band sounded, to make a bad pun, driven. It’s too bad that it took such tragedy for them to find a renewed sense of purpose. I can picture my brother getting fired up upon hearing “By-Tor and the Snow Dog”.

The Center for the Humanities at the UW-Madison is hosting a symposium that starts today called “The Rise and Fall and Rise of Paramount Records”. Paramount was a label out of Grafton, Wisconsin and is known for having released many historically significant blues and jazz albums. Back in 2006 I attended a lecture at the Wisconsin Historical Museum about Paramount so let me quote from it:

Paramount started distributing in 1918 and was a subsidiary of the Wisconsin Chair Company in Grafton (a bit north of Milwaukee). The WCC was contracted by Edison Records (Yes, Thomas Alva) to make phonograph cabinets. Seeing a lucrative market, WCC began making phonographs themselves and decided to give away records along with them. While Paramount is today best-remembered for having released music by blues and jazz legends such as Skip James, Son House, and Louis Armstrong, the label initially released recordings of bands playing ethnic music that appealed to the locals who were mostly German.

The inspiration for the symposium is the re-release of a slew of Paramount recordings in a two-volume set called The Rise and Fall of Paramount Records which are lavish productions that each include six LPs, a USB thumb drives with something like 800 songs, and lots of reproductions of period ads. Volume 1 appeared in 2013 with the second out last autumn.

The box sets are a collaboration between Revenant Records and Jack White’s Third Man Records and so it’s not surprising that they seem to ignore all of the other genres of music that Paramount released which wouldn’t be at home on the Oh Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack such as polka, dance orchestra music, and Hawaiian steel guitar. Considering the significant German and German-American population of Milwaukee, Paramount also released waltzes, schottisches, and so on. Sorry Mr. White but the music of America goes beyond the folk music created by African-Americans and people of Anglo-Scotch decent.

Anyway, here’s the schedule:

Sounds Transformed: From Analog Capture to Digital Formats
Thursday, April 23 at 3:00 pm
Room 313, University Club Building, 432 E. Campus Mall
Free and Open to the Public. Directions and Parking Information here.

Jeremy Morris, Assistant Professor of Media and Cultural Studies, UW-Madison
Craig Eley, ACLS Public Fellow, To the Best of Our Knowledge
Dean Blackwood, Owner, Revenant Records; Executive Producer, The Rise and Fall of Paramount Records
Amanda Petrusich, Author, Do Not Sell At Any Price: The Wild, Obsessive Hunt for the World’s Rarest 78 RPM Records (2014)

With Paramount as the starting point, this panel will examine how capture and playback of sound has evolved from early analog and electrical recording technologies to new digital formats, and how this affects the value of the recording as cultural artifact.

Music in a Box: The Containment and Commodification of Paramount Records
Thursday, April 23 at 5:30 pm Room
L140 Conrad A. Elvehjem Building, 800 University Ave.
Free and Open to the Public. Directions and Parking Information here.

This moderated conversation will “unbox” the Paramount Records story, discussing notable songs, addressing issues of commodification, the creation of artificial barriers between “black” and “white” music, the early history of the phonograph and record cabinet, and the subsequent physical containment of music.

The Other Sides of Paramount Records
Friday, April 24, 2015 at Noon
Wisconsin Historical Museum, 30 N. Carroll Street
Free and Open to the Public. Directions and Parking Information here.

Though best known for its blues recordings, Paramount released hundreds of records in dozens of genres, including work by a number of local Wisconsin artists recording Old Time (or Hillbilly) music, polka, and dance orchestra, including Stoughton’s own Jack Penewell, playing Hawaiian steel guitar. Come hear the music and tales of the musicians who made it.

Music and Media: Live Sounds, Silk Screens, and the Story of Paramount Records
Saturday, April 25 – 9:30am to 1:00pm
Bubbler Room, Madison Public Library, 201 W. Mifflin Street
Free and Open to the Public. Directions and Parking Information here

Matthew Bindert, Printmaker and Artist-Mentor at Artworking
Simon Balto, Musician and PhD Candidate in History and Afro-American Studies, UW-Madison
Jeffrey Kollath, Public Humanities Program Manager, UW-Madison Center for the Humanities

Join us for a music-filled, hands-on, all-ages Saturday morning workshop featuring a live performance by local musician Simon Balto, a record album silk screening workshop with graphic artist Matthew Bindert, free art projects, and a listening lab with record players, reel-to-reel tape decks, and more, all while learning about Wisconsin’s very own Paramount Records, a record label based in Grafton, WI that released some of the most influential blues, jazz, and folk records of the 20th century. Art supplies donated by Mad City Music Exchange. More information here, from our co-hosts at the Madison Public Library.

Spring is my favorite season but it is bittersweet this year as my brother passed away just shy of two weeks ago. It is early days yet in the grieving process and my eyes often tear up when I think about him for more than a couple seconds or dwell on particular memory. I have a long row to hoe before I get used to his absence in my life.

When we were going through his possessions I discovered that, just like me, he kept ticket stubs from the concerts he attended. I spared them from the trash for reasons unknown at the time but have since discovered a way to make them useful: since I have this music blog, why not podcast some of the shows that he attended? And so over the coming weeks I’ll be posting shows that featured my brother in the audience and that I have been able to find copies of. I found that I already had several of them in my possession when I came up with this idea and so I was off to a good start.

But before I delve into my brother’s concert-going experiences, I want to start somewhere else.

Anyone who has followed this blog knows that I am a big Genesis fan and that my fandom had to start somewhere. And it started with the above cassette. I was pleasantly surprised to find that my brother had kept the cassette all these years, though it was a rather doleful sense of joy.

Judging by the songs on the reverse side and other memories, I’d say the tape was made in the spring of 1982. The flip side has some songs from The J. Geils Band’s Freeze Frame, which was released in October 1981 as well as tracks from Blackout by Scorpions which came out in March 1982. It was at this time that I began to find myself alone after school. At some point my brother’s tape collection fell victim to my plundering. I recall listening to Led Zeppelin IV, a tape which had a mix of songs by The Doors and The Rolling Stones, and several other bands. Somewhere along the way I came across his copy of Abacab and threw it in the stereo. (No MP3s and no tinny little earbuds then.) It was wholly unlike anything I’d heard before.

My mother harbored (and continues to do so) a love for Johnny Mathis and Genesis stood in stark contrast to his anodyne crooning. My father’s taste ran more towards folkier sounds with a good dose of soft rock as well – I’m talking Joan Baez, Simon and Garfunkel, Fleetwood Mac of the mid- to late-70s, et al. Again, Genesis were nothing like that. But they were also different from the bluesy inflections of the Stones, the heaviness of Led Zeppelin, and the more poppy songs by The Doors. I think it was partly due to the lack of heavy riffs on the part of Mike Rutherford but mostly because of Tony Banks’ synthesizers. They just sounded unworldly to my young ears.

Another element that set Genesis apart was the lyrics. I mean, what the hell is an “abacab” anyway? This was before the Internet so I had no way of getting the lyrics. As you can see, it was a pirated copy of the album so I didn’t even know the names of the songs. I later found out that the album did not have the lyrics on the inner sleeve so, even if my brother hadn’t been a scofflaw, I’d still have been flummoxed. I thought that “Me and Sarah Jane” was about Doctor Who while “Dodo/Lurker” was sheer nonsense as far as I could tell. Even now some 33 years later and knowing what Phil Collins is singing, I still can make head nor tails of that song.

I played this tape over and over and over until I ruined it. While I cannot recall at what point this happens, I do remember the sheer horror of humming along to the album only to suddenly hear that the music from the other side had bled through all mangled and muffled. Presumably the playback head on the tape deck need to be demagnetized and cleaned. Ooops.

Fast forward to 1984. A radio station in Chicago announced that they were going to be broadcasting a multi-hour Genesis documentary. I remember well listening to it and still have it on tape. At the time I was only familiar with Abacab, “Paperlate”, and some of the songs from the band’s eponymous album. I was floored when I heard the Peter Gabriel stuff – a complete different voice than I was used to, Mellotrons, and lyrics about giant hogweeds and lambs lying down on Broadway. Unfortunately the program never played any Gabriel-era song in its entirety. Just as I was really getting into the songs, they’d fade out and be replaced by someone bitching about Peter Gabriel’s costumes.

The first song to avoid being unceremoniously truncated was “Squonk”. The song crashes in and then settles into a strong, steady beat. Collins’ drums have never sounded better. I had absolutely no idea what was a squonk was or why it was melting into a pool of tears but, nonetheless, it was love at first listen. I was off to the record store as soon as I was able to find the album that contained this magical song. A Trick of the Tail has been a favorite album of mine ever since.

Years later I found out that both “Squonk” and ATotT were favorites of my brother. Going through his CD collection last week I found that he had only one album from the band’s remix/remaster campaign from the late 2000s and it was ATotT. He came up here to Madison many years ago as I was throwing a party in honor of our father who had died a few months earlier. I was busy at work in the kitchen preparing food while “Squonk” was playing when my brother came in to grab a soda or sample the vittles and he was “singing” along. I use the scare quotes because he could not sing. Neither can I for that matter. However out of tune he may have been, that’s one of those memories that I shall treasure forever.

And so, because my brother’s tape collection had such a profound influence on my musical tastes, I am going to begin with a show from the ATotT tour in 1976. Sorry about ruining your tape, bro.

Several years ago I posted a show from this tour – here – but this concert came a few months later. It took place on 26 June at the Festhalle in Bern, Switzerland and is a wonderful audience recording. Very clear and lots of ambience. And it includes a great rendition of “Squonk”. Just a pool of tears indeed.

This is Genesis performing “Squonk” in 1980. If memory serves both the 6 and 7 May dates at the Lyceum in London were videotaped but methinks this performance is from the 6th.

As a super added bonus here’s a version of “Squonk” that is an outtake from the ATotT sessions. It is an instrumental version of the song. You can tell that the tune is not quite there but it’s close. I also like that one can hear the guitar and keyboards better without the vocals on top.

Last week Vox posted an interesting article called “Listen to what gets lost when an MP3 is made”. It features the work of a Ph.D. student named Ryan McGuire who is behind a project to let people hear the sounds that are discarded when a song is made into an MP3.

The MP3 format can reduce the file size of a song as much as 10-fold, but in the process something has to be filtered out. Which sounds get filtered out of a song to make the file smaller was determined in 1993 by a group of European sound engineers who using songs like Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car,” and Vega’s “Tom’s Diner.” In 1994, MP3s became a public format and, after the advent and widespread use of the internet, they are now the primary format that most people listen to music in.

But what happened to those filtered out sounds?

Ryan MaGuire, a a Ph.D. student in Composition and Computer Technologies at the University of Virginia Center for Computer Music, created a project called “moDernisT” to find out. McGuire’s project pulls out those missing sounds and lets them live on their own.

According to the article “Tom’s Diner” by Susanne Vega was the first song to become an MP3. And here are the leftovers from that song after having been compressed.

It’s quite a bit more than I thought it would be. I figured that stuff beyond a certain frequency would have been lopped off but it really sounds like the compression process takes out a bit of everything.

A new documentary about Nirvana’s frontman called Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck will premiere on HBO on 4 May. It is an authorized production with Courtney Love and Frances Bean Cobain as executive producers. This means that director Brett Morgen was given access to home movies, diaries, sketchbooks, photos, recordings, etc. that had never been made public before. In addition to the interspersing the above with the typical talking heads interviews and concert footage, the movie utilizes animated sequences.

From what I’ve read, Cobain’s suicide isn’t addressed nor is the tale of how Kathleen Hanna’s graffiti inspired the title for the band’s most well-known song, “Smells Like Teen Spirit”. These omissions and the fact that there’s no commentary from Dave Grohl owing to deadlines means that this won’t be complete in one sense or another; but Montage of Heck sounds like it will be a novel entry in the canon of rock star bios.

Folks here in Madison will get a chance to see the movie next month on the big screen as it will be at this year’s Wisconsin Film Festival. It screens on Saturday, 11 April at 6:30PM.

Steve Hackett has a new album called Wolflight due this spring. It is set to drop on 7 April here in the States. In advance of the release he has posted a trailer for the album. There are no whole songs included but I like what I hear in the excerpts and was surprised to find banjo ringing from my speakers.